5 Music Videos That Justify the Existence of the Internet

#2. Professor Elemental

The best thing about the Internet is discovering entirely new fields that don't just exist but are already stuffed with people who've been working on them for years. Sometimes it's terrifying, like websites that ask, "select gender of goat." Sometimes it's amazing, like finding out that "steampunk chap-hop dissing rap battle" isn't a Tourette tic but a style of music. (Though the only difference between the two is talent.)

Gentlemanly rap has already reached the level of spontaneous battle. (Although in rap that only requires two people.) The genius responsible is Professor Elemental, who decided that lyrics are a lot more fun when you can use words like "impertinent." He also has songs about tea, Frankensteinian animal experimentation, and others that generally prove that the most ridiculous idea can be awesome if you love it and work hard. Instead of sitting around strumming half-assed covers of other people's material. In case you're wondering, his target for this song was Mr. B The Gentleman Rhymer. To show there were no hard feelings, Mr. B gave Professor Elemental a cameo in his latest video.

If you even tried to explain these songs to a record company you'd be escorted out of the building, and the security guard who failed to prevent you from getting in would be fired.

#1. Acoustic Gangnam Style

Gangnam Style is still genius, even if you heard of it more than a week ago and have therefore decided it now sucks. It's a satire which works both as a satire of the elite Gangnam area, and as a genuine over-the-top music video, which is how satire is meant to work. (The Scary Movie series has destroyed people's ability to think of satire as anything but a genre in which you "Do something stupid that looks like something else, but with swearing.") The global spread of "Gangnam Style" is an obvious success for Internet video, and it features the greatest extra in the history of film.

PSY, YGA man with hips like that should come to and at every party. Everywhere.

It's great, and like everything else great, up to and including sex, the Internet has done its level best to destroy it. You'd have to live on International Space Station during a power-cut to avoid it, and then drop the entire station on Shergar's grave to reach the level of dead-horse-beating the Internet managed in a week. There is not a single series, instrument, video game or body part that has not been Gangnam-styled. And one band still managed to come out and make it all worthwhile.

UC Berkeley-based rock band Ra-On did things most of the other covers didn't: thought, and knew about music. It has the same effect that I described with German madman Peter Fox: Disconnect the language center and the voice becomes another instrument. With him, German became a combine harvester eating itself while singing about how much it needs oil. In Ra-On's lounge style, the Korean pours out like warm honeyed butter -- butter which is at that moment lubricating slow fireside audiosex. Tongues can't normally make you feel that way through your ears without licking them. Those voices come together better than most people's entire bodies do, even when those bodies also have a cameraman and people with instruments to help them.

Also, attention every asshole with a guitar at a party in my first year at college: THAT is what guitars are for. That guitar player is essential, far better than you, and he still knows his role is to make the music possible instead of trying to be the center of attention.

RaOnAt no point will this man destroy all conversation to make people listen to "Wonderwall."

And this was only made possible by the Internet's saturation coverage, which let Ra-On know about the song and motivated them to care enough to make their own version. Thus making the whole horrid meme-overdose worthwhile. Because that's the point of the Internet: Most people might be crap, but now and then we all get to see the few that aren't.